FEATURE FOCUS: Making Sense of Web Site Metrics

Many Web marketers talk about Web site statistics in terms of
click-throughs, unique visitors and page views, but have little
understanding of their value in terms of profits and the bottom line.
Thinking in terms of these metrics per se may have nothing to do with
actually increasing sales. It's surprising how little marketers know
about using Web Analytics to gauge Web site success.

When analytics first came out, webmasters and marketers were obsessed
with top-level data for measuring marketing campaigns such as traffic
and click-through rates. Not enough attention was paid to profitability,
and that contributed in part to the Internet bubble bust in 2000.

Many marketers continue to rely on basic campaign performance data as
their primary metric for measuring success, getting bogged down in
micro measurements while missing the most important business objective
of increasing profitability. While click-through rates are easy to
compute and understand, other metrics are more directly related to
achieving Web site objectives. Marketers who identify the metrics more
closely related to their specific business goals are in a better
position to increase their online success.

Identifying Web Site Goals

Start by defining your Web site goals first, which will be related to
your marketing campaign goals. Before any marketing campaign, you must
define a specific objective, which might be increasing leads, sales,
brand recognition, etc., and then apply the appropriate metrics.

What the most appropriate metric is depends on whether you are
focused on e-commerce sales, B2B leads, or other site goals. Different
metrics are appropriate for sites generating direct sales versus those
focused on generating leads that might convert offline. Companies
relying on sales personnel should look at the volume of leads a campaign
generates. Tracking leads, in this case, is a better metric of campaign
performance than click-through rates or unique visitors. Analyzing your
business goals will help you identify your most important metrics.

Using Cookies

When you drive traffic to your Web site and can't identify where
visitors come from, you can over- or underestimate campaign
effectiveness. By using first-party cookies and analyzing all the
activities occurring over time, you can better understand the value of
the leads generated by your campaign.

Cookies will identify the unique visitors to your site, allowing you
to track how many times a visitor is exposed to messaging during the
length of your campaign, as well as counting the total number of
interactions on your site before the visitors enter their personal
information, becoming a lead. However, the unique visitors metric
merely shows a basic level of success; you must also consider the number
of leads generated to know how effectively your campaign performed.

It is important to track leads throughout the entire sales process to
be able to act on the data. By knowing what happens with the lead after
it is collected, you can determine keyword effectiveness. The ability
of keywords to generate leads varies widely. By identifying which
keywords convert best, you can fine-tune your campaign to use those
creating quality leads versus those that merely drive traffic.

If branding is your goal, then measuring traffic increases can be
appropriate since many keywords generate low-quality leads. If you want
to reinforce messaging through multiple media, you must consider a
variety of appropriate online metrics. This is why it's so important to
establish site and campaign goals before selecting metrics for analysis.

Landing Page Viability

Some campaigns, both in the pay per click space and in the organic
search engine optimization space, are erroneously thought to be
ineffective because of low conversion rates when the true cause is that
the landing page isn't sticky enough. Landing pages should have
compelling content such as unique offers to encourage further
exploration of the site. Incorrectly designed landing pages that don't
encourage visitors to drill deeper could turn away potential leads, so
landing page effectiveness is a factor and must be evaluated. Measure
conversion rates after visitors start coming to the landing page. If a
campaign is performing poorly, revise the landing page by adding more
compelling content.

Some software applications measure landing-page performance. For
example, WebTrends Dynamic Search will evaluate the ability of your
landing page and keywords to match specific company objectives.
Salesforce also provides this capability and suggests landing page
content optimization can increase the percentage of clicks converting to
leads as much as a factor of ten.

Click to Sales Analysis

The best metrics will link traffic gains or click-through percentages
to overall business objectives such as increasing sales and
profitability. You can apply offline break-even sales analysis to
internet marketing by calculating how many sales (based on your profit
margin per average sale) must be generated to determine whether or not a
campaign is a good investment. This can be estimated for all marketing
investments, including offline investments such as trade shows and
online investments such as search marketing campaigns.

Currently, linking Web analytics and sales data is a manual process
requiring spreadsheets. However, major Web analytics firms such as
Omniture, WebSideStory, and WebTrends are addressing this need with
applications and services that can link Web and sales data to simplify
calculating your return on investment. These applications will be able
to incorporate Web data such as traffic analysis, email marketing, and
search marketing performance with customer relationship management (CRM)
sales data. Web data should also be combined with higher-level key
performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost-per-visit, cost-per-lead and
cost-per-sale.

The ability to tie marketing metrics with sales metrics can be a
challenge. Salesforce for Google Adwords can address the difficulty of
understanding the impact of keyword purchases on sales. This software
(sold as a service) traces the leads generated by keyword purchases and
follows them through the sales process to determine their return on
investment.
In closing, the sheer volume of statistics contained in your monthly Web
analytics reports can make it a challenge to interpret the metrics that
matter most. When interpreting your data, don't forget to focus on the
bottom line.

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